Instinct and Reflection
by Crazycatlady89
Summary: Based on the episode The Boiling Rock Part 2. Ty Lee didn't know what went through her mind when she stopped Azula from killing Mai. How will they cope with their betrayal while imprisoned?
Why does everyone think Ty Lee is stupid?

Superficial or shallow definitely.

Maybe she would even have gone so far as to say thoughtless.

She spoke too freely and trusted with ease. People had called her naive and she found no argument against it.

However Ty Lee was not stupid.

Stupid was reserved for her sisters. Stupid was reserved for girls who spend their lives on nothing. Never aspiring to be or do anything with themselves.

Unlike them Ty Lee had always wanted something even if she could not quite place her finger upon what it might be.

However Ty Lee was NOT stupid.

So how was it that she continuously did stupid things like that?

The second her outstretched fingers had jabbed into Azula's elbow, locking the nerve and preventing the flow of energy she knew she was a goner. The first strike sealed it, the second was just a pretty bow on top. Ty Lee always liked pretty things.

Chi blocking might be a new technique, entirely of her own invention but she knew the extent of her abilities and the strength of them.

When she struck she knew Mai was safe. Whatever gruesome consequences there might be for herself, at least Azula would not have murdered their childhood friend.

If only she had invented a sense of timing and interfered before the two girls worked themselves into such an awful rage.

Turning down your own future for someone who doesn't love you like you love them is a really stupid thing to do.

Azula didn't understand of course. She thought Ty Lee was doing this for Mai. To be honest Ty Lee didn't even realize she was doing it until it was done, she had reacted purely on instinct.

The fire nation princess' face had been contorted with rage and a symphony of conflicting emotions. Her eyes looked to her former companions with something akin to hurt and the weight of the betrayal broke Ty Lee's heart, and for one horrible drawn out second Ty Lee thought Azula would find a way to kill her, chi blocked or not.

Azula was always a resourceful one.

Mai had an expression of mild incredulity, probably one of the more emotional states Ty Lee has seen her in since their trip to Ember Island.

The girl with the pallid skin, always draped in layers had even shouted. Her hoarse voice missing the power of command Ty Lee was used to from Azula, but nonetheless it had been powerful enough to make the princess understand that her choice had been made, and it was not in Azula's favor.

They didn't try to escape, whatever happened they would face the consequences together.

Ty Lee never thought Azula was a very gentle lover. Her princess was formidable, passionate and always slightly cruel in whatever she did. But she is never gentle.

Neither Ty Lee nor Mai resisted when Azula asked the guards to take them away, the princess did not say anything when they were manhandled and dragged, Azula is much, but never gentle.

For inexplicable reasons they were made to share a cell.

At first they take turns to sleep, spending their shared time awake in either silence or low pitched rants, seared through with hatred, guilt and with amazement at their own audacity.

That does not last long.

The months drag by. Days trickle in and out of existence until they began to understand that their predicament is not temporary.

They are fed and watered on the clock, once they were even given an armful of straw to restuff their mattress.

Then one night the nightmares came.

Ty Lee had never heard Mai call to the shadows before. She had never seen the pale girls face so harangued by inner demons.

When tears fell, strewn so carelessly by a wasteful hand upon the dusty soil. Ty Lee crawled into their bed and she held her friend until the pain could yet again be contained.

They do not talk about the change but they began sleeping at the same time. Clasping each other in sleep so they could not fall over the edge, even though the bed was more than wide enough to accommodate their slight frames there was a constant fear of falling.

Fear becomes anxiety, to separate, to talk and worse to inadvertently end up discussing their increased level of intimacy.

In the darkest reaches of the night.

When Mai reached out for a kiss.

Ty Lee answered without hesitation.

The time was so short, between that kiss and the touching of bare flesh. There was no passion there just a wish to pass time, a wish to experience the ephemerality of fullness and happiness before once again having to submit to that attrition which slowly made dessicated their sanity.

As to deter Ty Lee from the thought that it was anything more than it appeared, Mai occasionally mewled a name, Zuko. Always that. Her fingers naturally reached to trace a scar around Ty Lee's eye that did not exist and never could. Less the wishing party somehow found a way to bend space time and fold in the lover whose survival had damned her to this place.

In the midst of the byzantine task that is high security penitentiary management the duo felt forgotten. Mai's uncle was no longer warden, how could he be?

They were not allowed in the yard as other prisoners.

They were not given separate cells as other prisoners.

Their nightly escapades somehow renewed Ty Lee's exuberance and she clung to the act. Molding Mai under her touch until the other girl cannot help but respond in full.

All good things however, are poised to end. They had been balancing so precariously upon a knife edge, letting their bodies speak when their mouths were too afraid. Always pulling away from attachment and substituting it with something stolen from the past. Ty Lee knew that it is Zuko for Mai, because the girl has made it so painfully obvious that the fingers that touched her and the lips that moved against her own were little more than placeholders.

Then she was weak, vulnerable under Mai's fingers and dextrous movements. Touched deeply by hands who had learned far too much too quickly for comfort. She gasped the name of her own shadow lover and in one single misbegotten moment reality interpolated itself into the paper palace their shared fantasy had build.

Ty Lee had one comfort.

That Mai did not know the depths of her relationship with their captor.

They pulled apart at the mention of Azula's name.

The threat of her imagined presence wedging itself between the places where their skin was melted together.

Unable to cope with the sudden unwanted distance Ty Lee's hand placed itself ever so gently upon the smooth alabaster skin of Mai's cheek. The gesture was intimate in a way they normally did not indulge in. Their touches were means to an end, at most pleasant distractions administered by the unspoken need to occupy themselves and their bodies with something, anything. They never sought to convey feeling or make demands. That was until now.

Ty Lee's voice was small, brittle "I choose you" she whispered.

A cacophony of thoughts ran through Mai's consciousness, she looked at Ty Lee and something clicked inside her.

Mai was tired of deception.

Tired of pretending there was another face present there. That big brown puppy dog eyes was anything but that. So long had they contorted and morphed to amber slits.

Somehow she had molded them to fit inside the reality Mai wanted not the one she lived.

That this garrulous, cheerful girl could have invoked the same emotion inside her that the taciturn, bitter youth of her first love had. One whom she had once loved enough to land herself in prison for but so often found herself dissonant from, not because they were different but caused by an aching want to see the other as an extension of themselves but always falling just short of that.

Mai was not one to show outwards emotion. She had been corralled into a shape of perfect aloofness allowed only the freedom to criticize or show disdain. Her own personality marred by the expectations of her parents and the needy and unwelcome wanting from her peers confining her until she felt like something lesser than an individual. Mai knows that for so long she has embodied the concept of a perfect daughter and allowed herself to be nothing more than that. That to admit weakness in the midst of utter failure reduced her to a state of shameful silent stagnation.

Mai was lucky though. That the girl at her side was nothing less than Ty Lee. The girl who reacted on impulse and spoke her mind even when it was not always welcome.

It was her who broke their standstill and leaned close again, bridging that newfound divide that sprung so suddenly between them, a mere consequence of their unreflected actions and one misspoken name.

Ty Lee mended it first with her closeness, then with another kiss. Tentative and sweet.

This kiss was not passionless or selfish as their other ones. It sought to speak without sound that which was still too fragile to mention.

And it left the paler girl wanting.

Not for Zuko or for distraction.

Not to lose herself in a blissful fantasy as a mean of mental escape.

But for once simple to taste the girl at her side and share with her a crumb of her innermost self that had been buried for so long.

As for Ty Lee, she felt that maybe. Just maybe she had found that thing she had been looking for but never truly been able to name.

 **A/N:** _I just finished rewatching The Boiling Rock episodes from season 3 and they always struck me as having one of the most profound moments of the entire series. I was deeply touched when Ty Lee chose to save Mai and I really wanted to write a kind of sad love story about them.. Since this couple has so little content, I figured, even though it is a little strange the hardcore Mai/Ty Lee shippers might enjoy it anyway._


End file.
